You have spent countless hours transforming a sales opportunity into an established and satisfied client. Chances are that when you first started pursuing your clients, you had a sales goal in mind for each account. But now these companies are existing clients and you have settled into a comfortable pattern of selling to them. You have a significant amount of business with each, but you aren't exclusive and you aren't getting anywhere near your original revenue projection. But they seem satisfied and you are content so you've diverted your attention to pursuing new clients.

Does this sound familiar? While it's easy to move on when clients don't deliver on the business that you projected, it's important to continue to look at existing clients as a way to grow sales. After all, marketing to a prospect is twice as expensive as marketing to an existing customer. It all comes down to wallet share, which we'll explain in this issue of Promotional Consultant Today.

Wallet share (sometimes called Share of Wallet) is the calculated potential opportunity in existing clients. You can calculate wallet share by following these four steps:

  1. Set up four columns on a spreadsheet and list your accounts in the first column.
  2. In the second column, list the total amount the customer spends with your company.
  3. In the third column, list the total amount that the customer spends in your industry. For example, the customer spends $100 on your products, but more than $300 on the total amount of products they buy.
  4. In the fourth column, calculate wallet share by dividing column three into column two.

Based on this calculation, you can determine the amount of penetration you have into that customer's business and the type of opportunity that exists. Here's how to interpret the results:

  • Low wallet share — Acquisition — opportunity to acquire a significant amount of new business
  • Medium wallet share — Cross-sell or upsell — opportunity to introduce new product or service based on current and future customer needs
  • High wallet share — You are deeply embedded with this customer. Focus on high quality service delivery and renew the business

Why is wallet share important vs. prospecting? Keep these points in mind:

  1. Focus on existing customers. While you might have some prospects on the list, the focus is intended to build business with existing client relationships. Why? These well-developed relationships provide leverage.
  2. Think of ways to access individuals within the company. This is the same group of people who felt strongly enough about you and your offering to choose you. You are not a salesperson anymore; you are their partner. As such, you can easily secure appointments with the decision-makers, decision-influencers and stakeholders within your client companies.
  3. You have access to information. This access to individuals within the client company can be leveraged to gain access to information. What are the client's 2018 initiatives? What new markets are they entering? In what areas could you make a difference for them? In what areas are there problems or challenges that you may be able to help them with in the future?
  4. You already know how to serve the client. Because they are existing clients, you can eliminate much of the learning curve that comes with onboarding new customers. You know their preferences, their corporate culture and their idiosyncrasies. All of this can be leveraged to allow you to more quickly create more value.
  5. Treat them like a new prospect again. Remember how you treated this client as a prospect? Remember how you and your team worked to develop that solution that would knock their socks off and knock your competitors out of the game? Create that experience again through an action plan.

Source: Cleverism is a community of people who share their experience and learnings from starting and growing a business ("entrepreneurial track"), how they got a job and excelled in it ("career track"), and how to be happy and productive while doing so ("personal development track").